Beijing Journal: Major League Baseball Arrives In China, But Traditions Don?t Quite Translate

BEIJING — My son didn’t know what to do with his peanut shells. He’s 12, the Dodgers were playing the Padres in Major League Baseball’s first game in China, and Roy didn’t want to sully the new baseball stadium with refuse.

About 12,000 fans attended Saturday’s game between the Padres and the Dodgers at the new baseball stadium in Beijing.

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I smiled with anticipation. On that beautiful Beijing spring day last week, I would share something I learned at Roy’s age from my parents: that one more reason professional baseball games take place in a better world is that they give children a license to litter. Because Roy was born and raised here in China, and because his mother is a fastidious European, such things need pointing out.

Then, just as the United States ambassador threw out the ceremonial first pitch, something happened that I’d never seen as a child at Phillies games. Roy and I had to lift our feet so that a cleaning woman in a yellow uniform could crawl beneath us, scrape together our discarded peanut shells with her fingers and stuff them into a black garbage bag.

“I thought you said it was O.K.,” Roy said.

I was embarrassed, and perplexed. (Nobody could give this poor woman a broom?) Maybe the baseball rules I had learned from my parents wouldn’t transmit so seamlessly to my own boy here on the other side of the globe.

Before that moment, everything around us had looked shipshape. The Beijing stadium full of 12,000 people was so new that the seat numbers were printed on paper and taped to the seats. The concession stand sold only hot dogs and other American food, but a group of Korean fans brought their own rice wrapped in seaweed. Vendors in red-white-and-blue shirts carried milk crates through the bleachers and asked, “Excuse me, would you like peanuts?”

But even things that seem normal in the United States translated in odd ways. The mascot of the San Diego Padres, a grinning friar in a brown frock, kept wagging his rear end at us. Chinese youngsters around us laughed, but I heard them asking their parents in Mandarin who the big bald guy was.

The seventh-inning stretch was also a mystery. Most of the Chinese stayed in their seats and listened to the English-language announcer sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Roy sang along; it’s one of the first songs I taught him. The Chinese woman next to us, who paid $100 for two tickets, asked what Cracker Jack was.

“A snack food,” I said. It seemed so inadequate.

“Do they have cheerleaders at games in America?” Roy asked. A squad of bare-bellied cheerleaders, known in Chinese as a La-La Brigade, shook their pompoms at the crowd. No, I told Roy, American baseball games do not have cheerleaders.

Roy follows baseball on the Internet. Where I once knew players through television and Topps baseball cards, he knows them through broadband and team Web pages. He also plays shortstop in a Saturday league run by Americans. To Roy, baseball means scrutinizing his computer every evening and playing one day a week.

After the seventh-inning stretch, I told him how I played baseball at his age. Catholic school ended at 2:30, public school at 3, and by 3:30 the boys all gathered with our gloves and bats on a dead-end street in Metuchen, N.J.

We played with a tennis ball and drew our bases with colored chalk. Home plate was a manhole cover. Our scorekeeper and street leader, Eric Philips, kept a loose-leaf binder on the curb filled with our batting averages, home runs, doubles, triples, errors. He was a liberal assessor of errors. Sometimes we fought about that. Sometimes we bled.

“Ever wish you could play like that, on the street with your friends?” I asked Roy.

I was really asking something different. Roy speaks four languages, can navigate a strange airport and knows where Lhasa is. But would he exchange his childhood for the one that I had — one predictable and repetitive and fun? Of course he would. Any kid would. I regretted asking.

“I don’t think so,” Roy said. “I like it here.”

I’m not sure I believe him, but I was relieved.

The Padres hit three doubles in the eighth to tie the game. One came from Adrian Gonzalez, whom Roy remembered for his grand slam in a one-game playoff against the Rockies last year. The crowd went crazy.

We taught the polite peanut vendor to shout, “Yo! Peanuts!” Roy explained to her that “yo” doesn’t mean “you,” it means “hey there.”

When the game ended in a 3-3 tie, Roy stood staring at the field with his hands outstretched, speechless at such a travesty. I had told him countless times that baseball is better than real life because it never ends in a tie. As we left, enjoying our shared indignation, the cleaning woman moved in, still picking up garbage with her hands.

Matthew Forney is writing a book about raising his family in China.

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